CEO Chris Carver’s Guide to Smarter Event Content Management

Chris Carver  [00:00:00]:

Removing the idea that this is just event content. It needs to be seen as this is actually marketing content. The more you include marketing in that underlying strategy of what should be at the event, the more they can leverage those folks throughout. These speakers are one of your best marketing assets that you have as an organization.

Alyssa Peltier  [00:00:20]:

Great Events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews [00:00:33]:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu [00:00:34]:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:35]:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Rachel Andrews [00:00:46]:

Hello everyone. What is going on in this wide world of events? My name is Rachel, and I am one of your hosts here at Great Events podcast by Cvent. I'm very excited to welcome a friend of mine, an entrepreneur in the industry. Chris Carver, welcome.

Chris Carver [00:01:03]:

Hey there. How's it going?

Rachel Andrews [00:01:04]:

Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Sessionboard. If you haven't heard of it, it's an awesome platform to manage your content, speakers, specs, amongst other things. But I would love to just hear from Chris for a second on his background. Chris, why don't you tell us a little bit about you? How did you land in this crazy industry, and tell us a little bit about your background.

Chris Carver [00:01:28]:

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Rachel. This is awesome. I've been in events for my entire life. I think from when I was sneaking into the Monterey Blues and Jazz Festival to working with... I used to work with Billy Bean in the Oakland A's when I was in college. And then really when I got out of college, I worked for a company that is now Cvent, but it was called Active Network. So I was there for about 10 years. And then I was starting to think about doing my own thing and my buddies were filmmakers for a nonprofit and they needed somebody to help run the nonprofit and distribute the documentary films they created. So I went to go do that for a year and I was there for four. But a big part of that strategy was to distribute our films through events, and so we had a national tour conferences that went along with it. So during that time, I started building a software platform to help around the operations of that type of thing.

So in 2014, we launched the software to support most of the major music festivals, the operations of most major music festivals around North America. And then COVID hits, no more music festivals, so we had to do something different and we ended up building a virtual event platform to help nonprofits raise money during COVID. And in 10 months, we ended up selling it. During the COVID time, there was three things led me Sessionboard, number one, seeing how much content was a critical aspect at that point and now to events. We also worked with Freeman during their virtual event days and we worked with the PGA Tour to help with their virtual MediaHUB, and so we took the proceeds of the sale of the company that we had created and we launched Sessionboard. So it's been a 30 year plus ride, but now we're where we want to be.

Rachel Andrews [00:03:26]:

Chris, what I love about your background is that you've seen a pain point in the industry throughout and tried to solve it for everybody, which is super cool. So kudos to you.

Chris Carver [00:03:36]:

Thank you.

Rachel Andrews [00:03:36]:

So let's talk about Sessionboard because content management is such a beast and speaking of pain points, it's a big deal and it can make or break your event and how you do your event design and your strategy. What inspired you to start Sessionboard? I feel like you had a little bit of a launch pad there.

Chris Carver [00:03:56]:

Yeah. It was interesting. I remember during the COVID days really just thinking, "Okay. What's this world going to look like post-COVID?" My partner Josh and I just started talking about how critical content is going to be and that's really evolved to the current strategy today. We just said, "We want to be the best in class at event content, and all of the components that go into it." So it really started with us honing in on the initial speaker management workflow. What does it look like to easily pick and select and evaluate your speakers and taking those speakers into the agenda and how can we make it super easy to manage your agenda and make changes and then onboard those speakers? And we know there's so many steps that go into it, these little mundane workflows.

We said, "Okay. We want to optimize that as the first step in this overall strategy." And that really is the beginning of allowing us to collect a ton of content and really start to aggregate these organizations that are influencers, subject matter experts, thought leaders. So that led to us just saying, "We're going to be great at this and then we're going to integrate with the other really good systems like Cvent out there that do all the other things."

Rachel Andrews [00:05:18]:

I love that. I mean bringing together call for papers, all your speaker stuff, and into the agenda and then flowing into an event tech platform is awesome. But you also have some cool features that help you with the specs of the room and bringing that all together and empowering your speakers to be able to see that so you don't have to answer 8,000 questions. I appreciate what you built. It's helping our team a lot. We're using it for Cvent Connect this year, so it's been awesome working with your team and I'm excited to have that implemented with our other tech, so it's just flowing all nicely together. I'm going to hit you with a hard one, as a CEO in the event tech space, I know that there's been a lot of change in the last 10 years. What has been your biggest lesson that you've learned starting this company or starting other companies?

Chris Carver [00:06:04]:

Yeah. I think it's two things. One is a broader picture about just my philosophy on the event space and how you build a really good product in that space. It's just that events are different and you can't treat events like your typical software because in my mind, relationships and deeply understanding the everyday challenges of the event marketer is so critical. I have the luxury a bit to have walked in their shoes at points in my career as on that side of things, but it's evolving so fast that you have to have such a hyper focus on just being so empathetic with what they're going through on a daily basis, which is why I'm envious of what you have at Cvent and you, Rachel, is because you are the customer. And by being the customer and starting a business, you don't have to constantly wonder what they're thinking about when they're interacting with the product. So it's so critical just to walk in their shoes is number one.

Number two, the thing that I've learned with this Sessionboard company that we've launched and built, is that as the event marketing industry has changed, what I've seen is you've typically had your event marketing team over here and your marketing team over here, and there's a divide. Even within the event marketing teams themselves. So you have your tier one teams, you'll have your field marketing teams, you'll have your webinar teams, you'll have your community teams, you might even have a podcast team, and they're all pretty siloed. But for me, the through line of that from the event marketing side to the marketing side is content.

So by us having that north star, it really helps us think and strategize about what we want to build for our customer too. Because what's also really interesting and a big learning as a part of that is it's been interesting to see how AI has impacted even that theory because as AI-generated content has just massively saturated the market, what you see is your content marketing is getting harder and harder to see the same ROI. So on top of that, you have systems like Google and even LinkedIn in their algorithm, they're now focusing on what they call EEAT based content.

So EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authority and trust. And as I was reading that six, nine months ago, I'm like, "Who is that?" That's your speakers. Your speakers are that authority. And to be able to leverage that, not just around your event and not just after your event to continue to drive registrations, that's a key component to the overall content marketing strategy of the overall organization. The learning is that these speakers are one of your best marketing assets that you have as an organization. So I would say those two things, is number one, as a event entrepreneur technologist, you have to walk in the shoes of your customer. And then number two, with this space in general, content to me is really the bridge between marketing and events.

Rachel Andrews [00:09:15]:

Yeah. Content is king. Speaking of walking in the shoes of your customers, are there still gaps and challenges that you guys are helping? I know you've already realized that there was a gap in challenges where you started this company, but I'm assuming you work at it every day to help those pain points. I'm sure you have customer listening sessions and things like that. Are there things you're currently working on that are helping bridge more gaps?

Chris Carver [00:09:41]:

Absolutely. Well, first when you think about even just the speaker management workflow, so if you have a call for papers and you have all the things we talked about, there's so many little steps that you can optimize to save time. For example, one of the things we're working on, just to give you a picture is, can you institute AI in the evaluation process to call down the 90% of submissions that you would otherwise get and waste a lot of time on so that you can hyper-focus on the 10%? Now, there is the question of does the event really want to use AI or do they not? Because the feedback is some don't and then some do, or the requirements of some are really high, so you have to make that optional. So that's just one picture of it.

A second one is how can you better integrate systems like we just integrated with one of your partners as well, InGo, how can you deeply integrate that into the speaker onboarding experience so that they can better promote your event? So little things like that are really critical. The other area that we're just constantly working on is now giving the event marketing team their own database of all of their speakers so that they can do deep search for any marketing activity or any event. So I could say, show me all the speakers in my portfolio across my tier one events, my webinars, my field events, and that have an area of expertise that are this level that are X, Y and Z. And it pulls up that list. I should be able to see all of that data on that speaker so I can leverage them for future efforts.

The challenge that you'll see is a lot of times the marketing team will go to the event team, but the event team's on site at an event and the marketing team's saying, "Hey, do you have a speaker that has an area of expertise in X, Y and Z?" But that event team is so busy you can't get back to them. So it's like how can you reduce that effort and then help the teams work better together? So systems like this, there's so many little things that you can do that our roadmap is definitely dense with time savings. The nice thing about time savings, having that as a metric, it's a real definer. How much time do we think that we'll save if we release that or if we do that?

Rachel Andrews [00:11:52]:

We talked about this before, but time is a gift. Time is valuable, and time is the only thing that planners don't have more of, and so if the more you can give that value of your tech to them, I love the SME dashboard because the amount of times I've rung my head like, "Did we have them speak in 2018?" I cannot remember what they spoke about. The tags of the SMEs is awesome because then you can have this sent to the content team. And the fact that you can take your tier one event and then move them into a webinar is also great.

Chris Carver [00:12:26]:

Or even using your call for papers, not necessarily just as a way to find speakers for your main state session or your breakout sessions, but you might have people in your call for papers that would be great for a webinar down the road but may not be great for Cvent Connect in June. We're seeing more and more folks use different aspects of the system for different strategic purposes.

Rachel Andrews [00:12:47]:

Well, speaking of it, you guys have a roster going on in your content series of speakers. You always have the who's who list of content for the year. Event content professionals to follow, which is awesome and people should look at that and follow those people because they are the ones in the industry moving us forward, always being thought leaders. You have this whole content series that you're doing that I found really fascinating because you market it in a cool way. You have some awesome sessions, you have some awesome content. Tell us a little bit more about that and how you came up with that series and what you're doing with those.

Chris Carver [00:13:21]:

In terms of the content series, I go back to you got to walk in the shoes of your customer, especially in the event space. So what we've done essentially, and you've been on it two years in a row now as one of our event content pros to watch is we just think there's so much interesting strategic stuff going on within that niche that we really wanted to highlight, create work primarily for us to actually just follow what's going on so that we can help build value into our product initially. And then we said, "Okay. Well, let's take that one step further. We want to launch our own event marketing strategy. How do we do that?"

So we recently launched what we call an Event Content Lab, and it's basically a workshop. We did one in San Francisco with 20 plus amazing event content executives. We spent three hours going super deep onto certain aspects of the event content process, and then from there, we'll be launching an e-book that will highlight all the individuals in the contribution they make or they've made to it. And then what that allows us to do is distribute the e-book, and then following the distribution of the e-book, we will host an open roundtable webinar on Zoom or something like that where other people can come in and talk about what they learned, about their own thoughts.

Our idea is how can we establish our own event marketing program, turn it into really great deep content on event content strategy and extend the life of that with these amazing individuals that are the authorities, are the experts in the field? So we're trying to live the things that we're putting out. We talk a lot about EEAT based content, where that comes from speakers. Well, in this case it comes from those event content pros like yourself, Rachel, that then the industry really tends to dive into.

So a couple of stats that's really interesting about influencers in the B2B space, 63% of B2B buyers trust what influencers say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself. That's from Edelman. And in this case, the influencers are the event marketers. In an event marketer's case, the influencers are their speakers. The ones they work so hard to get and come speak at their event, and there's just so much you can leverage from that. So there's other stats like influencer marketing in the B2B world can generate up to 11 times higher the ROI compared to traditional digital marketing tactics. And that's only going up as you think about AI generate content and what I talked about with saturating the market. So we're trying to live it as much as possible so that we can continue to use our product within that framework.

Rachel Andrews [00:16:05]:

That's awesome. Those are some good stats too. Because I feel like sometimes we share things as "influencers," I don't feel like I am one.

Chris Carver [00:16:13]:

People trust you. They trust you, that makes you influential.

Rachel Andrews [00:16:17]:

I just like bringing topics up and discussing it. That's probably why I'm on a podcast and webinars and such. But I'm assuming these content series, you have success stories from that that you've brought to your customers that help them even more?

Chris Carver [00:16:29]:

Absolutely. So there are so many, but we interviewed Rachel Morrissey with Money20/20. They spend so much time thinking about content, how they distribute content, and one of the things that we've talked a lot about with just other event markers that we talked to from that was how they leverage the speaker on site and after. It's super interesting because their whole theory is, look, speakers want to speak. If I've applied to speak at Cvent Connect or at one of your events, I want to be there and I want to talk about whatever kind of thing that I've researched so much into. So why give me just 20 minutes on stage? Why not leverage me throughout the rest of the event?

Now, it's easier said than done, but one of the cool things that they do is they limit their speakers to a certain time on stage, but then they move them right to a step and repeat like press style interview, and then for many of them they'll have podcast style on site. And then they'll move those people to potentially PhD level sessions and this more than anybody, but there's people in the audience that really want to engage in a specific niche topic. This gives them the opportunity and they're leveraging the speaker to do that. So it's stuff like that where we're just trying to learn as much as possible because it also helps us understand, okay, where can we have Sessionboard live in this ecosystem and this strategic nature of leveraging content in that way?

Rachel Andrews [00:17:57]:

The longevity of content is super important because you spend so much money on these events and then it's over, and we've changed that. We do what you just said, we interview them, we have gathered voices or reverb help us on site to continue that video content or testimonial content or subject matter expert, whatever it is, and then use that for later. We're also doing more podcasts, Cvent Connect TV, things like that to prolong it. I've wanted to do this, but we haven't not asked the experts, but asked the speakers was what you're saying PhD level, it's very similar. The people that are experts in it are like, "I already knew that," and that's how I feel about every AI session right now in the industry. I go to every AI session, I'm like, "Everybody freaking knows what AI is. Give us real tangible things that we can learn to do and bring back."

Chris Carver [00:18:45]:

If somebody walks out of that PhD level session with a really tactical way to do that, they're going to take that directly to their boss and I guarantee you they're coming back to your event next year. The other thing I think is really interesting is removing the idea that this is just event content. It needs to be seen as this is actually marketing content, but the more you include marketing in that underlying strategy of what should be at the event, the more they can leverage those folks throughout, the more they can actually apply their speakers to it, the more authority that gives to their own content marketing down the road. It may not be exactly what they presented on stage, but at least you're tying those subject matter experts to that content marketing for whatever it is throughout the year.

Rachel Andrews [00:19:30]:

That's why it's so dumb when demand gen and event marketing and event logistics are not in lockstep with each other because it's like, "Why are we doing this event? We need to be leveraging all of that."

Chris Carver [00:19:41]:

I actually think a couple reason why that has occurred throughout all of event marketing for as long as I can remember is a few things. I think structurally it's really hard. There's a logistics mindset and then there's a marketing mindset and we have structured the organizations in a way that it's really hard to have them speak the same language, and then the reality is they don't speak the same language. So that's where I think content can be that bridge in helping us actually start to not see what is the ROI of that onstage content, but it's actually what is the ROI of that onstage content that's been turned into digital content that originated there. So it's almost like, "What was the source of the content, just like you would say, what was the source of that lead in a pipeline for a sales rep?" I think by actually starting to normalize that and have event marketers and marketers focus on many of the same stats, then that will start to improve.

Rachel Andrews [00:20:37]:

Yeah. Some planners don't even have a content person. They're doing it themselves or working with event marketing, but I would recommend working with your demand gen teams or your global marketing head, whoever it is, and focusing on what are those global campaigns we're running for the year and how can those themes take place at the event and leverage it because people complain all the time about not having budget. You don't have a breakout in a certain time in that room, leverage it for a webinar. Leverage for a podcast, and it does not have anything to do with the event. That's why this year I'm like, "Do we want the backdrops to all be Cvent Connect? Maybe we have some that are just Cvent so we don't have to rebrand the backdrop."

Chris Carver [00:21:16]:

There's a group run by Mariam Skogol and Rachel Cohen from GitHub and Mariam's at Broadcom. They run the event content council, and if you're an event marketer, definitely join that. They talk about these exact things. They talk a ton about cross-departmental collaboration like you're saying and how important that is at the very beginning of the strategic process because having that buy-in is really critical. And it's stuff people know, but the tangible ways that they do it is really great.

Rachel Andrews [00:21:48]:

Yeah. That's a cool call out. I'm going to fast-forward here for a second. Let's talk best practices for content speaker management. Just brass tacks for maybe folks that don't really know what that means, or some just what to know if you don't know on the content management side, session management, speaker management being more strategic with, we've already talked a little bit about being more strategic with your call for papers and your speakers.

Chris Carver [00:22:13]:

I think even before that, to me, it starts with truly believing that these speakers are your subject matter experts, your authorities, your influencers, your thought leaders. So step one, is you got to get that into a database. You got to be able to quickly search and find those so that you can reuse the ideal ones so you can say, "This person's not good for the main stage." Things like that. That's number one. You got to do it. Let's get that into a database of some type, even if it's an Excel spreadsheet and it's one Excel spreadsheet. So step two is like we talked about, I think really involving the entire organization in the call for speakers process if you have one for whatever flagship event you're working on.

The second thing around call for papers that I would really suggest leveraging is the call for papers doesn't just have to be a call for finding speakers for that specific event. It can be a mechanism to really find great thought leaders for whatever it is throughout the year. That's really critical. I think the agenda side, one of the huge time sucks is when I make a change to an agenda, or I update an aspect to a session and I gather them manually imported into my website or my registration system.

So first step, it's why we actually integrated Sessionboard and Cvent. The beauty of that is that those updates automatically update in Cvent so that I no longer have to worry about the nuances, the changes and things like that. It just automatically happens. So you can go through that workflow of all of those steps and start to see where the time savings are. Another one that I highly recommend, if you have more than 20 speakers, what we have found is that it takes about 5 to 7 hours to manage a speaker from the beginning to end, and that's on average. Some speakers take more because they don't respond and it just takes 100 different emails.

Back to your stats, Rachel, a system like Sessionboard, we've had a number of clients start to calculate that they save about two to three hours per speaker for event. Clarion did a case study and audit for, there are four engineering events that they have and they have a bunch of others. They saved about two to three hours per speaker, but when you start to look across four events that have a few hundred speakers pop, it starts to add up quick. So they calculated in their first year, they saved about 3,000 hours across just 4 events. It's not about getting rid of the employees, it's about where are they best able to spend their time, and that helps them rethink the engagement with those speakers even when they're on site and how you can leverage them more, making sure those sessions go off really well as opposed to in the mundane did they send their headshot in and do I have to remind them? And so you get into that.

Another one, Diversified Communications audited 13 of their events and they saw 150% increase in time saving from getting their agenda launched, is like crazy to see that type of impact. Time is so critical to all of us and it's hard to understand with all of the event tech tools out there, what is working for other folks, that's where referrals come in and that's why those types of things and this type of relationship is so important.

Rachel Andrews [00:25:42]:

I really appreciate you highlighting the time savings because that's one of my things is, I'm very selfish when it comes to buying things or looking at systems. I just want to know what you're going to do for me.

Chris Carver [00:25:52]:

The reality is the event world is so small that if you don't live up to what you're saying, it's going to come back to you.

Rachel Andrews [00:26:00]:

Yeah. Well, besides obviously Cvent Connect, what are you looking forward to in the next few, it could be the year, next few months?

Chris Carver [00:26:07]:

Here are my favorite things to do. My favorite things to do are honestly to talk with our customers or prospects. I don't really even care if it's me selling them Sessionboard. It's more about just understanding the opportunity and things like the event content lab. We have one coming up in Boston in May. I just love being there for three hours digging into the specific topic that you've committed your life to and starting to see the opportunities where you can make those improvements. And obviously as a CEO, I see the opportunity to just add more value and grow as a company, but as an inventor of things, I just love the idea of seeing where you can help other folks and add value to them. So a lot of it is giving me as many opportunities as I can to get in front of people.

So it's different conferences. That's why I'll be at Cvent Connect from end-to-end, and we will do that Event Content Lab. And I'll be at the CISO CEO conference early next week and talking to all of the independent show organizers. But another area that I got to figure out is I'm really interested in understanding how senior level marketers understand events, so I need to start getting in front of those types of folks just to understand that, and that's just from my own inquisitive nature. Because I really am bent on trying to connect the dots between event marketing, event content and marketing content and the marketing team.

Rachel Andrews [00:27:34]:

I just recently went to a SEMA event and it was the most cathartic event I've been to recently because it was all event marketing leaders talking about their challenges, and I was like, "God, I'm not alone. This is so nice."

Chris Carver [00:27:47]:

The thing I've heard about event marketers is you guys, and I'll throw myself in the mix too, is we're so head down doing our thing that it's hard to even pick our heads up and say, "Who else is out there doing what we do?" Or taking the time to just connect with those folks. We did an Event Content Lab in DC in the Bay 2, 3 weeks ago, and I swear 50% of them said I haven't been to something with my peers in a couple of years. So it's like we need more of that for sure.

Rachel Andrews [00:28:19]:

Yeah. That's why I love planning industry events for a living. I am the person that's bringing the family reunion back together and it feels really nice.

Chris Carver [00:28:27]:

Yeah. One last thing I'll say is one of the things that we've done, we actually started about a year ago, we call it event marketing executive in residence, and it's really just five hours a week. They're working with us to understand what they're going through, helping us think about content more, helping us think about their world so that we can stay really tightly aligned with the things that we should be working on, and that's been really a cool way for us to walk in the shoes of the customer, and I appreciate how you guys do that at Cvent Connect.

Rachel Andrews [00:29:00]:

Amazing. Well, you've just dropped a wealth of knowledge on us, and I appreciate you joining our podcast. Any final words, where can our listeners find you? Obviously, on LinkedIn, you're very active in sharing a lot of great content, so I recommend listeners go follow Chris.

Chris Carver [00:29:14]:

Tell me if the content is helpful, for sure. I'm available anytime. You can even have my email. It's chris@sessionboard.com. If you ever want to give me feedback on the platform. Let me digest the feedback. Let me take it in. If you have any ideas, that's what I want to hear. It only makes our platform better and it helps us add more and more value.

Rachel Andrews [00:29:34]:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for joining Great Events today. I know our listeners really enjoyed it, and obviously we'll link to everything that we talked about today on our podcast website. Thank you so much again, Chris for joining, and we'll see you next time, everyone.

Chris Carver [00:29:50]:

Yeah. Thanks, Rachel.

Alyssa Peltier [00:29:52]:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews [00:30:04]:

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu [00:30:14]:

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Rachel Andrews [00:30:21]:

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Felicia Asiedu [00:30:31]:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier [00:30:41]:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.